PigzUp

PigzUp is a beautifully made, wooden stacking game for 2-4 children that looks like the fun it turns out to be. The set consists of 8 wooden pigs, a wooden die and a deck of 60 round cards.

The wooden Pigz all have soft, felt ears, large painted noses in one of 4 colors, and their tops and bottoms vary in width. The cards are numbered 1-4, and are also in 4 different colors. Some of the cards are in more than one color.

The cards are distributed, face-down, as evenly as possible to all the players. Players then flip over their top cards. If any of them match, those players race to see who can be first to stack their Pigz. They have to stack as many Pigz as the number on their matching cards, and make sure that the Pigz on top of the stack are the same color as on the matching cards.

The player who succeeds can get rid of the cards she already played. The other player has to return his cards to the his stack. The first player to use up all the cards wins.

If they want to use the die (making the game more fun and more challenging), they can only touch their Pigz according to the roll of the die, either: using only a finger of each hand, only one hand, or only by the ears. Younger children (the game is recommended for ages 4 and up) might have enough difficulty just determining when a match is made, or stacking the Pigz (given that the tops are different sizes), so you might wait before you introduce the die. But once they are able to use the die, the game becomes much sillier, the added challenge making even losing fun.